i know that aaron seigo wouldn’t like this very much but if you are smart enough to NOT disable the rightclick on the desktop and NOT disable the run command interface while removing all the panels.. you could remove the cashew without ending up with an unconfigurable desktop..

how to remove the cashew?

sudo chmod 600 /usr/lib/kde4/plasma_toolbox_desktoptoolbox.so

this will last until the next plasma update that touches this file.. (unless you make it immutable)but it’s a oneliner.. just do it again after the update 🙂

Did you install a kde-centric distribution on your parents pc? do you want to set up an internet terminal in a public area or in your office and you are tired of being called because a toolbar or an important widget has suddenly disappeared ?

Create a file called /etc/kde4/kdeglobals (or add your options to ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals) and write something like the following in it: (there was a GUI for that in development but it seems dead by now)

plasma/containment_actions=falseplasma/containment_context_menu=falseplasma/allow_configure_when_locked=false #no rightclick on plasmoidsplasma/plasma-desktop/unlockedDesktop=false #this is new

The [$i] will make the whole section immutable – that means it will not be overwritten by any user config-files read afterwards. (the given example will remove the lock-screen option, disable the run-command interface (krunner), lock application toolbars and (maybe in the future) disable the add activities feature, also the option to remove the logout entry and completely disable the context menu on kwin’s titlebar is working in 4.11 yay!!!)

____________________________________________________

Unfortunately some of the options in the kiosk documentation (especially the plasma specific ones) are not up2date therefore you will not be able to lock down plasma completely (at least not right now) but there is another solution to lock down plasma and make the “unlock widgets” entry disappear !

just write a single [$i] in the first line of ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc -and- ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktoprc this will make the whole file immutable and hide the unlock widgets context menu entry.

Of course [$i] can be used to lock down specific widgets(sections) or just single options like height or width of the folder view widget for example.

Be aware that anybody who knows how to find those config files is still able to alter them e.g. remove the [$i]!

In order to secure the desktop completely you’ll have to copy those files to /etc/kde4 and go one step further…. disable rightclick on the plasma desktop containment: rightclick on the desktop – Mouse Actions – remove “Right-Button”

____________________________________________________

It is really hard to lock linux/plasma down.. there are still several ways to get control of the system when you know your way around keyboard shortcuts.. you could change to a new tty for example.. or just invoke any suitable keyboard shortcut. In my special case there is actually no need for a keyboard so i managed to lock down almost everything … only the cashew with it’s “add activities” feature remains.. since there is no reliable way to remove the cashew and no way to remove the activities feature this leaves plenty of space to mess around with the desktop and make it unusable for the next user at the KIOSK PC. (activities can be added but interestingly you can’t remove them afterwards in the locked state ^^)

for now the only way i found to restrict everything was to remove the cashew completely by setting the rights of the cashew library to forbidden:

sudo chmod 600 /usr/lib/kde4/plasma_toolbox_desktoptoolbox.so

So after all i got this totally locked down system where the only thing a user is allowed to do is to start one single task ( a unique one click live-linux-usb installer based on kubuntu 😉 http://life-edu.eu/ )

With a keyboard attached i’m able to administer the complete system thx to “krunner” (the only shortcut left alive) and with the two scripts i wrote, “desktop-lock” and “desktop-unlock”, im able to toggle the KIOSK mode in seconds ^^

On my school everyone is using some sort of cloud storage nowadays. there’s skydrive, googledrive, icloud and of course dropbox. So i thought i’ll give them ONE cloud where they can share easily with each other and are in full control of their data. There’s only one little problem. i don’t want to create 700-1000 accounts for students and teachers so it was clear that the users need to be able to register by themselves. it is enough work to delete all the accounts of dropouts and graduates anyway 🙂

since this feature is not implemented i decided to search the internet and i found a 4 months old ‘sort of functional’ implementation of the user “pellaeon” on github in a subtree (linked on mailing lists and forums).

i found out what is needed to make it work, fixed a lot of php bugs (introduced new ones ^^), CSS’ed it to fit in, ported it to owncloud 6 and added the option to filter “trusted” networks and only allow one registration per email address.

7.) configure OC – create admin user (database with the new tables will be created)

8.) create a group for the new users called “selfregistered”

9.) logout

10.) give it a try

11.) change the value of $iprange in ‘core/registration/ip.php’ to your needs

wildcards allowed !
* (everyone is allowed to register)
10.* ( registration is only available from local area network 10.xxx.xxx.xxx)
10.1.2.* (only subnet is allowed to register)

this is definitely an experiment. i’m no owncloud developer and i don’t have enough sparetime for doing it “right” (as owncloud APP for example)

the original creator stopped working on this 8 months ago so this is probably the best you can get right now.. if finally someone found the time to implement this as app – please let me know.. (email in the about.txt)

(this would create 3 partitions on sdb (winshare/system/casper-rw) casper-rw would come in place if you chose to add persistent to the syslinux.cfg file and store all the changes and “system” would be the bootable installation target (sdb2) – winshare speaks for itself)

Next, we will get usb-creator python code to assist us. (we need bzr to get the sourcecode)

$ sudo apt-get install bzr

then…

$ bzr branch lp:usb-creator

create a file with this content and name it usb-creator-cli, place this file in the usb-creator directory (root of bzr branch)